


all swallowed in their coats

by rocknrolljunkie989



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M, Multi, Sharing Clothes, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 16:58:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5593885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rocknrolljunkie989/pseuds/rocknrolljunkie989
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Poe's jacket becoming <em>their</em> jacket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all swallowed in their coats

Before Finn even realizes it, Poe’s jacket stops smelling like Poe.

The jacket smells like Poe in Jakku, even with the heat beating down on him, trying to bake it away. It’s comforting in a way, bringing him the strength to take one step after another through endless sand with mourning weighing down his heart. It smells like Poe when BB-8 recognizes the jacket, when Rey hunts him down, when they steal what turns out to be the Millennium Falcon, when he meets the legendary Han Solo. It even still smells like Poe after the run-in with the rathtar.

Finn has never been _someone_ before. His value has always been measured by what he can do for the First Order and by how well he can follow orders. This concept is new to him, this running away, this _defiance_. Every time he makes a new decision, takes a new path in the spur of the moment, when his heart pounds in his throat and danger approaches, a little part of his mind fills with doubt and threatens to spill over.

And when it does, he tugs the collar up to his nose, and he thinks of Poe. Poe, who decided that two letters and four numbers are not enough to define a human being - who gave him a name and his humanity all in one fell swoop. Poe, who showed him what it was like to feel adrenaline spiking his heart rate in the best of ways. Poe, who he lost in the rubble of a TIE fighter scattered in the sands of Jakku. If there’s one reason to keep going, it’s Poe.

Somewhere, on the way to meet Maz, the jacket stops smelling like Poe.

There are thousands of other things to worry about - he is, after all, a fugitive on the run from the most dangerous threat that the world has seen in decades. And yet, when the fighting stops and he can just sit down and _breathe_ for a moment, when he brings the jacket up to bury his nose in it, it’s to find that the jacket smells like… nothing. It’s distinct from the scent of the Falcon (something old and full of memories but long since untouched, yet hot and dry, like Jakku), yes, but Finn can’t distinguish the scent of the jacket (which was once something a little dark, a musk like leather and adventures and time spent working on fighter jets) from himself.

The weight of the jacket on his shoulders still gives him strength, but the knowledge that he’s somehow lost one more piece of Poe Dameron sits heavy and sick in the pit of his stomach until he makes it to D’Qar and realizes that Poe is still alive and that the jacket, really, isn’t Poe’s anymore.

__

Rey doesn’t know the jacket as being anything but Finn’s.

She knows, of course, that it’s not actually _Finn’s_ , that it belongs to Poe Dameron. But Poe Dameron is a mystery to her, a man weaved in her mind’s eye by the tales told to her by Finn and BB-8. It’s the jacket of a Resistance pilot, someone who risked his own life for the better of the whole galaxy and was lost in the process. A good man, she thinks. A noble one.

But the jacket? She’s only seen Finn swathed in it, and so, to her, it’s his.

The first time she wears a jacket, it’s on the Starkiller Base. On Jakku, she never had a reason for anything heavy - sleeves were not for warmth, but for protection against the harsh sun and stinging sands. It’s a strange sensation, donning something so considerable. Even with the press of time, she has the presence of mind to consider its weight, both physical and mythical.

When she brings the sleeve of it up to her nose, it smells like Finn. Like running, like fighting, like the thick of battle and panicked adventure. Like the stormtrooper who rebelled. Rey might be the girl who raised herself in the sands of Jakku, but she was never part of the darkness and she never had to pry herself away from its deadly grasp like Finn; she inhales the scent, and it gives her the willpower to keep putting one foot in front of the other while surrounded by the enemy.

She doesn’t wear the jacket for long - but it’s long enough.

__

When Poe and his jacket finally reunite, it’s over Finn’s sleeping, healing body.

It’s heavy in his hands, heavier than he remembers, weighted down with memories and experiences that he never saw with his own two eyes - things that he’s only pieced together from the vague hints he scavenges from conversation. Poe clutches the jacket in a tight fist as he looks down at Finn, and he thinks of how wrong it looks now, hanging limply from his grasp. How wrong it had looked draped over the back of a chair, discarded with more important things to attend to. How it’ll just keep on looking wrong until it finds its way back to Finn.

Han Solo is gone. General Organa has been swept up in preparations for the battles to come. The enemy, for now, has been defeated. Rey has departed on a quest to find Luke Skywalker. Finn lays on a table balanced precariously on the line between life and death.

And Poe?

Jacket in hand, Poe toes the chair closer to Finn and settles into it, never taking his eyes off of the man in front of him. The unassuming, rogue stormtrooper, a man trained to kill but who still couldn’t stop himself from succumbing to the desire to do _good_. The man who found his name in the cockpit of a TIE fighter and went on to change the galaxy as they know it.

Despite himself, a smile tugs at the corner of Poe’s lips. A wan, tired, but hopeful smile.

As Finn’s chest rises and falls with shaky uncertainty, Poe presses his nose into the jacket. It doesn’t smell the way he remembered it; it doesn’t smell like himself. It hardly even feels like his own anymore, as foreign as it is. It smells like Jakku and dry heat burning his lungs and nose as his throat screams out for water. It smells cold, like the Starkiller Base, the kind that seeped into his bones even in the cockpit of his X-wing and made him yearn for the heat of the fires that he’d helped cause. It smells like gently lapping waves and fear and triumph and mystery and the kind of adventures that belong to the stories he grew up hearing as a child - the stories he’s eager to hear now. If he has to sit here for weeks until he hears them, well. Something tells him it’ll certainly be worth it.

___

(They find him hours later, fast asleep in the chair that’s become a permanent fixture at Finn’s bedside, jacket draped over his shoulders like the hug they’d exchanged when they reunited at the Resistance base.)

**Author's Note:**

> just expository stuff while i get the hang of the characters!
> 
> title from White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes


End file.
